I’ve been nominated by my brilliant pal Chris Estey to post 25 albums in 25 days that have had a major CREATIVE impact on me—just album covers without any explanation—and to nominate a different person each day to do the same.
Today I nominate: Devin McKinney
Day 12:
John Cage * Christian Wolff: CARTRIDGE MUSIC (1960)/THREE PIECES BY CHRISTIAN WOLFF (1961) (Time Records, 1963)
John Cage * Christian Wolff: CARTRIDGE MUSIC (1960)/THREE PIECES BY CHRISTIAN WOLFF (1961) (Mainstream Records reissue, 1970)
Never issued on cd, but finally reissued again on LP (in Italy!) ca. 2016.
Purchased: 20 August 1988 in College Park, MD.
The audio from this album doesn’t exist on YouTube (though there are subsequent, far LESS EXTREME, versions of “Cartridge Music” posted on the site), but this ca. 2016 link to the Italian reissue label does provide excerpts of each of the four pieces by Cage and Wolff.
Since the original 1963 performance of “Cartridge Music” is TWENTY riveting, brutally noisy, minutes long, this brief extract can merely hint at its paint-peeling MAJESTY. But you’ll certainly “get the idea”!
https://boomkat.com/products/john-cage-christian-wolff
And this brief, thoroughly engaging introduction to “Cartridge Music” (by a Seattle electronic musician named Michael Schell) provides all the basics you’ll need to understand why the piece is such a pioneering-yet-highly-entertaining achievement!
For my own part, I’ve rarely encountered such a blistering, brain-buggering work of proto-Industrial Music! And certainly nothing like it prior to the late-’70s.
And I suspect my own, improvised, ca. 1993-94 Stardust Flamers work with Moog Prodigy synth and screeching, “glassy”, hyper-trebly slide guitar (in combination with Tim Midyett’s more heavily distorted electric guitar “noise-scapes”) might not have become quite so extreme without the inspiration this 1963 John Cage/David Tudor recording definitely provided.
Or ever existed at all, possibly!
I initially encountered this John Cage LP in August 1988, on the first occasion I ever worked at the Record & Tape Exchange location in College Park, MD, near the University of Maryland.
I normally worked at the RTX in Fairfax, Virginia, nearer where I then lived, but had agreed to sub in CP, partly out of curiosity to see both the store and its vast subterranean record warehouse, which occupied a small house and its basement along Route 1, just inside The Capitol Beltway.The guys in the store typically played the U of Maryland’s student station, WMUC 88.1 FM, and on that particular Saturday afternoon I suddenly took notice of one of the most gouging, scraping, glorious noisefests I’d ever heard!
Twenty minutes later, the ‘MUC DJ back announced his set, so I suddenly knew what recording I now sought. Later that day, while I was being given a tour of the catacomb-like warehouse beneath the store, and more or less on a whim, I took a quick look around for the John Cage record in question.
Much to my shock, amazement, and immense pleasure, I found a SEALED copy of the 1970 reissue of John Cage * Christian Wolff in the cinder block stacks, priced at $3.99! I purchased it forthwith, and have been subjecting friends who profess an Appetite for Noise to it for just over 31 years now.
